Oral Camera Shots

I wrote this 2 months ago. As I put the finishing touches on it today, I realized just how bless-ed and sun-caressed the land of the east is. I know going back there would be accompanied by the most "peaceful easy feeling," but the road is my home for now. However, for all of you westerners, here's a taste:

. . . As I was driving down the South Carolina coast, I passed along the I-526 across the Ashley River. Dawn was barely beginning. What opened before me to the southeast was what I shall call a dark pastel sunrise. All was under the spell of a gentle pre-sunbreak light, except the charcoal silhouette of the horizon, the marsh grasses, and the two Ravenel towers. They stood as mighty and entrancing as the silent contemplative evening I saw them so many years ago. The water below the bridge shimmered with the deepest, emotionally-potentate blue.

. . . An overcast sky ruled all day. Around 2 1/2 hours before sunset, the sun came blasting through and sent every inch of water along the Cooper River a-sparkle. The smoggy air gleamed with enough combined intensity to make driving difficult at first sight. Everything danced and felt alright. 

Pleasant Valley - Strawberry Fields Forever

I got dropped off in Ventura yesterday morning at twilight (we drove all thru the night), and it was oh so calm and gentil. The sophisticated kind of calm. The air held a welcoming and spicy smell of eucalyptus trees carried along by the new morning wind. I took a nap in the park and it was warm! Went and bought a pair of swim trunks for fifty cents, and took a dip at the beach. The water was cold but fun, and then went for an excellent 20 mile bicycle ride. I felt so cool, bare-chested and sunglasses propped on my head. The sun was so clear and the fog-banks rolling in so beautifully through the grape-y brown dusk. Vineyards sat on foothills and even mountains in the distance, and strawberry fields stretched to the left and right of me as far as the eye could see. I missed how open the country is here. Came to the home of a wonderful and hospitable family I knew a year ago. Through combination of lack of sleep and the strenuous ride, I needed a good day's rest. The next night I went for a stroll and to visit more people. I came back to the home during a slight drizzle. I put my bicycle in the back, hearing crickets chirping, other grand music (A Spanish Ballad) and a man next door saying "eat more, eat more" with the utmost hospitality in his voice. This is California. Camarillo, California, to be exact. I was here from January to March of 2012. Never a boring moment. Never a dark, gloomy day.

Reflection: A-town to K-town

An alternate title to this post would be "Letting the road show you who you are"
As I left Asheville, NC, I felt something awakening inside of me. Me and my 25 pounds of items on the back of my bicycle being all of my belongings, life became real and the road became a pathway to deeper understanding. Conversations with people got more pure and more real. I met people in the dead of night or on buses that I'd have never met otherwise. And the things I got to share with people: the joys of the road, my family, my religion. I think I became most pure when I was in Knoxville, TN and having just completed a 45-mile ride, finishing in the dark of night (though well lit through the dozens of miles of strip malls. I couldn't believe how maddeningly-long the shops all were). I went to a church social activity and introduced myself, all smiles, as "Hello, I'm John Kotab, and I'm a career hitch-hiker and cyclist." In other words, I was telling others that, like Kerouac in '49, "[I was] fulfilling [my] only one and true purpose of the time: to move". I was proud and happy and calm. I got stuck in Knoxville for 5 days, and it really tried my patience. I wanted to get out but kept ending up stuck. Looking back, it was for a reason. It is always for a reason. I think that my time in Tennessee served as a beacon to me: left and indication and compass in my heart as to what I should be and what I should feel while I travel.
Let me tell you about what made this all possible (somewhat of an homage to Daryl). A week before leaving for the 2-year mission to California, I borrowed a friend's bicycle. I didn't have it for more than a few hours before destroying the derailleur, having to spend 50 dollars to fix it (in hindsight, this may have roused his sympathy). I gave it back in a manner of speaking, not being able to return it to him directly but leaving it at my sister's house for him to get when he was able. He let me keep it. A Dawes Lightning, weighing in the high 20s (pounds). After quite a bit of trips to the bicycle shop, it was road worthy for a good multi-hundred mile trip. And many hundreds of miles it will get. I just calculated the distances between the towns I'll hit in California, its over 300 miles, and thats not counting the dozens of miles that will add up fast bicycling within towns.

I Like Trains

Today I thought I'd do something I haven't done before. I will simply relate, non-poetically and empirically, what I did today.
I woke up in Logan, Utah and it was very cold. Me and my friends got involved in service and then I was dropped off in Ogden, Utah. I rode five miles to the train station. It was pleasant and rural and a refreshing ride. After getting a ride to north temple street in Salt Lake City.  The train system and city creek mall are very impressive. Afterwards I rode with a friend back to Ogden to see a hockey game ( Weber State vs. BYU ). It was great. I felt like a kid again. I rode to the train station, getting there just in time. It was downhill the entire way. Boy was I glad to see the words "UNION STATION" in big red neon on Wall Street. The 2-hour ride home was tiring but invigorating. I had many good conversations with some passengers. After I got off the train is when I had the greatest exchange of the evening. A gentleman from Bozeman, Montana was holding up a sign that read "CHIHUAHUA".             He had an air of one who is completely liberated. He remarked that "they treat gringos really good there. And it is getting colder, and martial law is coming, so Mexico is the place to be. You should try it. . . " He wandered off into the night as I bicycled to where I'd be staying that night

Provo

I woke up this morning and opened up my tent and rain-fly to see snow. . . or least it appeared to be.
This was my first experience with sleet. The tent melted any ice and the tree above dripped plenty of water onto the bivouac. It certainly is a 3-season tent, though with the sleeping bag rolled up under where the rain-fly covers, it is a fine day shelter while I leave. I have already spent a week and a half in Provo, Utah, and I'm beginning to enter the harder weather. This morning, with rain just 500 feet below, I figured it was time to move before the rain line creeped up the mountainside. One of my socks was slightly moist and this was more than enough to make my trip from the campsite to the temple hasty and tingly-numb in the toes. All-in-all, I love this weather. Yesterday early evening, I saw the snow up on the elevation line adjacent to Rock Canyon opening. Most would shudder at the idea of camping at 5200 feet while below at 4600 the ground was draining rain from the day, but I looked up at that fresh powder and thought, "delicious," confident -- and later confirmed -- that the snow line would creep well into the valley come night time and leave me cozy and dry.
Flash back to right before I got here. We (me and my rideshare. He provided the vehicle) left Cadiz, KY at 9:30am and I took a nap (barely) in the back seats outside of Kansas. My partner woke me up to switch after remarking that the road was hypnotizing him. I began to drive, and began experiencing what caused him to surrender the wheel. I felt the certain madness of this very straight road. We headed due west for hundreds of miles. The road had one purpose and one purpose only: to plunge us straight into the mountains. I felt like we were journeying into the belly of some beast, being impelled incessantly, impetuously, onward. And this was no mere dramatization. Driving over Denver, Ft. Collins, and Vail in the dead of night with single digit temperatures was more than challening. We drove into Eagle, CO at 4am, both getting a bit tired, took an hour break and drove the rest of the way. I balled that truck all the way down the mountain to Utah floor. High desert. Passed another continental divide, and I brushed it off with no emotional cost. It was just beyond that point, east of the CO/UT border when that vagabond feeling came to me. I looked over the desert morning, yellow and teeming and realized finally and for all that I have no home anymore. I look forward to feeling that more often in the coming year. I looked at all the canyon water realizing that in a few weeks when I began my bicycle touring that this is all the water that I (with iodine tablets) would be drinking.
My plan (if no ride is secured) is to ride from Provo, Utah to Mojave, CA, and continue bicycling into Tehachapi, spend a few days in Alpine Forest, and then ride down the grade to Bakersfield, San Luis Obispo, Lompoc, then Oxnard. Riding between SLO and Oxnard will be breath-takingly brown and tan and black. The best part about this: I may not even need my bivouac

Stories

"I might some day walk across this land, carryin' the Lord's book in my hands. Goin' 'cross the country singin' loud as I can, one of these days" - Rice, Rice, Hillman, Pedersen "One of These Days"
Leaving Asheville, NC, I stopped in Cherokee, NC b/c I wanted to deeply connect with the spirituality of this people. I wanted to marvel at and serve the descendants of Lehi's people. Between my religious and secular readings of these people's culture, I want to hear it directly from the source, not just from the mouth of the white man. I just read that gold in Georgia is what sold the Cherokee up the river. In 1805, all alliances were ignored in the lust for riches. The Cherokee stories and folklore are also what drew me to this area. Their account of the creation of the world and the Fall of man/Adam have chillingly similarities to the specifics of my religion. Were it not for the brilliant Tecumseh (who created the Cherokee phonetic system and a chief elder's decision to have someone write down these stories, they may have never made it into our books and minds. They have great and lasting value. And just like my pioneer forbears, so also the Cherokee were chased out of their own land. The trail of tears stories have always brought tears because it is like many stories we feel so connected to and grasped by: We are not hearing about another's experience, we are reliving our own experience, or vicariously living those of our forebears (the remnant of their existence lingering in our being, in our very chromosomes, moving us to action). When I got dropped off in Cherokee by a very kind man from Murphy, I began to fiddle with my pack, musing upon how when I was in Band or Jazz Ensemble in high school I realized that it is so much more rewarding to make (play) the music rather than simply listening to it. Anyone involved in performance music can attest to this. It is exactly the same way hitting the open road. It is one thing to read an adventure (story). It is an entirely different and deeper matter to play (make) your own song (story). That's where I am (2nd last paragraph). I am not satisfied to hear about the journeys, I must go and make my own stories.
The road is the guitar, so ride down it and sing your song.